2026-05-12 Tagged: llms Does it make sense to hire junior engineers in the age of coding agents? Junior engineers are expensive, both in salary and seniors engineers’ time. This cost was partially recouped through code contributions, but today, it’s more effective to directly maximize the output of your senior engineers. The hiring market reflects this trend: senior engineers have an easy time finding jobs, while fresh CS grads are having their worst years ever. And yet, OpenAI, Anthropic, and many top companies continue to compete fiercely for junior talent. What’s going on? In this essay, I’ll explore the changing nature of expertise in the age of AI. Math as an analogy I think it helps to think about the impact of AI in terms of math, which had its AI moment half a century ago. There used to be a job called “calculator”, which was a human who could do math calculations accurately and quickly.…